Clinton’s claim to winning the popular vote count includes counting the primary results in Michigan, where Sen. Barack Obama’s name was not even on the ballot. In addition, her count doesn’t include some caucus states won by Obama — Iowa, Nevada, Maine and Washington state — where the popular vote was never reported. And she also includes the results from Florida, where none of the Democratic candidates campaigned.

Furthermore, even using her methodology, the low turnout over the weekend in Puerto Rico likely guarantees she will not end up winning the popular vote anyway.

CHARLESTON, WV—Hillary Clinton once again attacked Barack Obama on the issue of experience Tuesday, this time questioning the Illinois senator’s ability to effectively smile, make appropriate eye contact, and offer sufficiently delicious finger foods when welcoming visiting world leaders. “My opponent has never greeted foreign dignitaries such as the Japanese Minister of Forestry and Fisheries, as I had the opportunity to do when I was first lady,” Clinton said, adding that she has an extensive background in both double-clasped hand shakes and idle small talk with political luminaries from several nations. “Do the American people really want a president who doesn’t know when it’s appropriate to gesture toward a chair, indicating where a head of state should be seated?” At a previous speech in Indianapolis, Clinton had challenged Obama’s ability to create a health-care reform initiative that would ultimately fail and hand Congress over to the Republicans in an electoral landslide, as she did in 1993.

The English language has a rich vocabulary but meager grammar. Where most languages’ verbs offer subtle shades of meaning with every choice of suffix, English has only blunt instruments like “should” – our inflections barely account for person and number. So it is that evey last vestige of grammatical nuance is precious and must be cherished.

Which is why, dear friends, I bring this grave news. One of those few survivors is now clinging for its life, and at this very moment its unwitting executioners – some of them on this very blog! – threaten to let it fall away, lost forever.

That victim: The contrary-to-fact subjunctive.

It began on March 10 of this year, with Geraldine Ferraro’s asinine assertion that Obama wouldn’t have gotten so far in the Democratic primary “if he was a white man.” As a defender of the subjunctive mood and a devoted Obama fanboy, I was doubly pained to hear those words. My irritation turned to dismay and horror when I learned that she had said the same thing about Jesse Jackson in 1984, except then she said Jackson wouldn’t be where he is “if he were not a black man.”

And so the subjunctive was dead to Geraldine Ferraro.

Read the rest below the fold, or by clicking the link. Doing so is required. (more…)

“I think that they played the race card on me. We now know, from memos from the campaign that they planned to do it along.” – President Bill Clinton.

And that’s how President Clinton begins his answer to WHYY’s Susan Phillips who, during a phone interview earlier this evening, asked the President how he feels about one Philadelphia official who says she switched her support after interpreting Clinton’s remarks in South Carolina as an attempt to marginalize Obama as “the black candidate.”

Clinton goes on to say that “you have to really go some to play the race card on me.” He lists a number of his accomplishments on behalf of people of color, inexplicably putting the fact that he has “an office in Harlem” at the top of the list.

Clearly, Clinton seems clearly frustrated by the question or the suggestion by anyone – either the reporter or the Philadelphia official whom she quoted – that he was somehow making a negative statement about Obama (or Jesse Jackson) based on their race. His frustration comes through towards the end of the recording when, apparently unaware that he was still on the line, Clinton asks whoever is with him, “I don’t think I should take any shit from anybody on that, do you?

Holy living–! I don’t want to watch this any more! Bill Clinton has clearly gone from “savvy politician” to “slow-motion train wreck.” I think he feels bad–from my armchair psychologist perspective–that he’s been such a drag on his wife’s campaign and knows no other reaction than to try and compensate, and instead, make it worse.

Would you please stop, Bill? This is painful. You used to have real trust with communities of color, and you’ve thrown it all away. I mean, I want Barack to win, but it hurts when the opponent is being marginalized by an out-of-control spouse. It all seems like a bad sitcom.

Part of the problem with Hillary’s bid for the presidency is that Bill’s campaign was promoted as a “two-for-one deal,” with two remarkable public servants running for the White House. I can’t help but feel–particularly when Bill fails to shut his yap–that it’s all an underhanded, Kirchner-style switcheroo. Bill is undermining Hillary’s image as a calm, measured hand on the Presidential phone, and giving us nightmares of a man who cannot handle his wife running a campaign alone, much less running a Presidency alone.

That’s really an unfair statement; Hillary needs to be judged as her own woman, not as some kind of counterpart to Bill. There is, of course, a fair amount of sexism inherent in the media’s fascination with her husband (as opposed to, say, Michelle Obama, who has gaffed before, but never with Clintonian gusto), as well as with Hillary’s campaign narrative that she has sixteen years of executive experience through osmosis.

Hillary’s her own woman; she’s not an extension of her husband. Unfortunately, the two people most responsible for undermining that message are Bill and Hillary.

PITTSBURGH — Following a rally for his wife’s campaign at Market Square in Pittsburgh, former president Bill Clinton suggested his wife would already be the nominee — if she were running under Republican party rules.

“If we were under the Republican system, which is more like the Electoral College, she’d have a 300-delegate lead here,” he said. “I mean, Senator McCain is already the nominee because they chose a system to produce that result, and we don’t have a nominee here, because the Democrats chose a system that prevents that result.”

March 3, 2008

Mark Penn is one of my least favorite people in the world, and it’s been this way for some time. (See, I hated him before it was cool!) It would take too long for me to recount here why I dislike him (besides the fact that his most recent book, Microtrends, was surely meticulously designed to piss me off), but today, we can add a new reason: he’s bad for Hillary.

Well, we’ve known that for a while now, as Mark Penn’s “Strong! Experienced! Solutions!” mantra has sank like a stone when given to a populace fed up with the way things are. (Big party switches are like that… you don’t want to emphasize experience in a race that’s essentially a referendum on the status quo.) He should have seen this happening, as the voters this time were most moved when Hillary shed a few tears on the eve of her New Hampshire victory, and we saw a human beneath that steely resolve. We suddenly remembered, oh yeah, we spend eight years with her as our well-regarded first lady, kind of a second aunt to the nation. We like her. We want her to win.